Beyond inputs and outputs: Process‐oriented explanation of institutional change in climate adaptation governance

Climate adaptation is a growing imperative across all scales and sectors of governance. This often requires changes in institutions, which can be difficult to realize. Explicitly process‐oriented approaches explaining how and why institutional change occurs are lacking. Overcoming this gap is vital to move beyond either input‐oriented (e.g., capacity) or output‐oriented (e.g., assessment) approaches, to understand how changes actually occur for addressing complex and contested governance issues. This paper analyses causal conditions and mechanisms by which institutions develop in climate adaptation governance. It focuses on urban climate governance through an in‐depth case study of Santiago, Chile, over a 12‐year period (2005–2017), drawing on primary and secondary data, including 26 semistructured interviews with policy, academic, and civil society actors. It identifies and explains a variety of institutional developments across multiple levels (i.e., programmatic, legislative, and constitutional), through a theory‐centric process tracing methodology. This reveals a multiple‐response pattern, involving several causal mechanisms and coexisting institutional logics. Findings suggest that although adaptation may be inherently protracted, institutions can nevertheless develop in both related and novel directions. Overall, the paper argues for a new research agenda on process‐oriented theorizing and analysis in climate and environmental governance

Nominally protected buffer zones around tropical protected areas are as highly degraded as the wider unprotected countryside

Protected areas (PA) are central to safeguarding biodiversity and ensuring the long-term provision of ecosystem services. Multiple factors influence PA performance, including the level of degradation in the surrounding areas (SA). Buffer zones (BZ) comprise a key strategy to increase PA performance as they are subject to land-use restrictions to inhibit the spatial contagion of detrimental effects of SAs onto PAs. However, BZ conservation performance also depends on multiple factors. Here, we seek to understand the degradation status of ~29 million hectares of nominally protected terrestrial BZs, and how this relates to PA characteristics and their environmental and socioeconomic contexts. We applied land-use mapping to the largest national network of tropical PAs on Earth (the Brazilian PA network) and estimated BZ degradation status using the cumulative natural area converted into anthropogenic land-uses. By 2017, individual BZs were significantly more degraded (40% ± 32% SD) than areas inside PAs (16% ± 23% SD), but almost equally degraded as the unprotected countryside surrounding BZs (41% ± 31% SD). Degradation status increased around small PAs sited in economically prosperous regions, especially those dominated by private lands (particularly smallholdings) but decreased where connectivity with neighbouring PAs was most prevalent. Our results indicate that de jure land-use restrictions within BZs have not been effectively enforced, since their overall status is no better than that in surrounding landscapes under unrestricted land-use. It is imperative to integrate the management of BZs and PAs, as well as to promote higher overall PA connectivity, to ensure their value-added efficiency

Conservation planning for people and nature in a Chilean biodiversity hotspot

The Mediterranean-type climate region of Chile is a globally unique biodiversity hotspot but its protected area system does not adequately represent the biological diversity, nor does it provide equitable access to people. We explored options to expand the protected area system to cost-effectively improve the conservation of forest ecosystem types while simultaneously enhancing social accessibility to protected areas. Social accessibility is defined as the access of municipalities to cultural ecosystem services provided by protected areas which depends on distance to highly demanded protected areas and income of the municipalities. Using systematic conservation planning methods, we identified priority areas for extending the existing protected area system that: (a) minimise land acquisition cost, (b) maximise social accessibility and (c) optimise for both cost and accessibility. The results show that it is possible to improve social accessibility while simultaneously minimising land cost. Considering cost alone, the protected area system could be expanded to improve biodiversity conservation by 86% at the cost of $47 million USD, which would also increase the accessibility of protected areas by 12%. Accessibility can be increased by a further 18% by jointly considering cost and accessibility without compromising the cost or biodiversity performance. New private conservation policy developed in Chile could help offset the costs of conservation through novel public–private partnerships. Our results can provide specific guidance to policymakers to strategically identify new locations for protected areas which cost-effectively improve biodiversity conservation, while at the same time reducing inequality in social accessibility. The consideration of social access in reserve design could increase the success of protected areas as a conservation tool by bringing people closer to nature. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.</p